Plane Missing With 3 Aboard

A twin-engine Cessna carrying three men on a training exercise disappeared about 30 minutes after takeoff from Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport Tuesday night and remained missing late Wednesday.

The plane, registered to Southern Pride Aviation, Inc., left Fort Lauderdale at 6:30 p.m on Tuesday, apparently heading for Pahokee airport, said Maj. Harvey Bennett, a spokesman for the Civil Air Patrol. The plane was last heard from at 7 p.m. the same day, he said.

"It's like a puzzle. We're putting this together as fast as we can and hopefully save lives, too," Bennett said on Wednesday. "We knew about this last night. We couldn't get off the ground till daybreak."

Search planes spent the day trying to find the missing plane, looking near Lake Okeechobee. The pilot didn't file a flight plan, Bennett said, making the search even more difficult.

Bennett said the pilot was believed to be William Wolcott, a flight instructor, but he could not identify the other two men in the plane. Police agencies involved in the search would not confirm identities of any of the men on the plane.

However, Bennett said, officials had been in contact with Wolcott's wife, who said she thought he was piloting the plane and had not heard from him since Tuesday.

"He was one of the crew members. Whether he was flying the plane is unknown to us. We believe he was the certified flight instructor on board," he said.

Tuesday, Bennett added, was a beautiful day for flying. Visibility was high, he said, making it unnecessary to rely solely on flight instruments.

A man who answered the phone at the company's Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport office Wednesday night said he could provide no information about the missing plane or who was on it.

Southern Pride Aviation, an airplane charter service, flies to the Bahamas and the southeast United States, its Website shows. During the course of the day on Wednesday, search teams found what seemed like leads. However, all proved false. The Martin County Sheriff's Office responded with a helicopter to reports of an oil slick in the southeast area of the lake, but did not find anything, said spokeswoman Jenell Atlas.

Rescue workers from Okeechobee and Glades counties searched the lake by boat.